Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!emory!utkcs2!de5 From: de5@de5.ctd.ornl.gov (Dave Sill) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: Software installation opinions needed Message-ID: <1990Sep20.162445.28180@cs.utk.edu> Date: 20 Sep 90 16:24:45 GMT References: <25908@shamash.cdc.com> <1990Sep19.125944.6489@cs.utk.edu> Sender: news@cs.utk.edu (USENET News System) Reply-To: Dave Sill Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Lines: 46 In article , rowe@cme.nist.gov (Walter Rowe) writes: > >>Software installation: should we a) _Move_ the program binary to a >>place where people expect to find such things (i.e., something that's >>probably already in their $path) ? > >Dave> Probably a good idea. > >I don't necessarily agree for a couple reasons. I agree with your reasons, but my answer was in response to Dan Horsfall's question about his particular application. I didn't get the impression that he was talking about a very large or multi-filed package. I surely wouldn't want X or FrameMaker dumped in toto into /usr/bin. >[1] We have nearly 100 machines on our net served by five central > servers. When we upgrade machines, its nice not to have to > re-install all the third-party software we have. Ever have to > install something like X11R4? Its quite time consuming. Tell me about it. But X is a special case, I think. At least, I couldn't handle a bunch of similarly large and complex systems. >[2] Using symlinks, we can keep all the various third-party packages > separate, and their self-documenting. For instance, a symlink in > /usr/local/lib like "libX11.a -> /depot/X11/lib/libX11.a" lets me > know right away that this is part of the X11R4 distribution and > not part of the OpenWindows 2.0 distribution which also contains a > file by the same name. Good point. Unfortunately, vendors can't rely upon the availability of symlinks. >As an aside, one option we are looking at here at NIST that would help >solve this exact problem is the SunOS TFS (Translucent File System), >which allows you to mount directories in a stack and still see all the >different files underneath. Sounds neat, but it won't be a real-world solution for a long time, if ever. -- Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov) These are my opinions. Martin Marietta Energy Systems Workstation Support